


The Shadow Behind the Glass

by Mertiya



Series: Walking the Mirrors [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Angst, I think I ripped my own heart out writing this, M/M, Mirror Universe, Mirror universe isn't exactly right but it's the closest I can think of, Mirrors, Pre-Slash, Reichenbach Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 12:45:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/687101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mertiya/pseuds/Mertiya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Holmes family has always been able to walk the mirrors. Sherlock learned the art from Mycroft when he was seven years old, too young, his mother said, but he was insistent, and Mycroft taught him anyway.<br/>“You must never, ever take anyone with you,” Mycroft tells him, as he shows Sherlock how to squint his eyes and see the doorway through the glass, the distortions of surface rippling and fading.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shadow Behind the Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Untitled](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/17412) by I don't actually know. 



> So I really am hoping I'll write a sequel to this (probably just the one), but this thing was eating my brain until I wrote it up. I think I tore my own heart out. Hence why a sequel should happen when I've got the time. I was supposed to be working on other writing, or maybe my LONG John/Sherlock fic, but this just...decided it needed to happen. I hope you enjoy reading it! :)
> 
> Not beta'ed or Britpicked; all errors are mine.

            The Holmes family has always been able to walk the mirrors.  Sherlock learned the art from Mycroft when he was seven years old, too young, his mother said, but he was insistent, and Mycroft taught him anyway.

            “You must never, ever take anyone with you,” Mycroft tells him, as he shows Sherlock how to squint his eyes and see the doorway through the glass, the distortions of surface rippling and fading.

            “You’re taking _me_ ,” Sherlock points out.  He reaches out a finger curiously, and it feels no resistance, nothing but a slight lowering of temperature.

            “No, I’m showing you how to walk it yourself,” Mycroft says.  “That’s perfectly safe.  But most people cannot walk themselves through mirrors, and if you take someone with you, you’ll both be trapped in the mirror-world.”

            “What if you really need to?” Sherlock asks, though he cannot imagine ever wanting to take someone with him.  Mycroft steps through the mirror, and Sherlock follows him.  It’s colder here, and a little darker, and everything is reversed, of course.  “Couldn’t someone else come through and bring you back?” he persists.

            “No,” says Mycroft.  “People have tried.  If you bring someone else through, you break the universe a little, and the universe doesn’t like to be broken.  You’ll both be trapped here.”

            That would be _so boring_.  Sherlock instantly makes up his mind to be very, very careful.  But it’s not so difficult, because he’s never wanted company anywhere, so why would he ever want to take anyone through the mirrors with him?

            The mirrors are useful.  It’s easy to get around London, because if you do it right, there are shortcuts on the other side, and Sherlock isn’t even fourteen before he has all of them mapped out.  He can get from one side of London to the other in under two minutes if he runs flat-out (though if he wants to do that, he has to be careful, because he has to slide out and in of the mirror-world in places where someone might see him, and the only other thing Mycroft warns him about is that he must never, never let anyone know what he can do.)

            He can get around so easily, disappear into a bathroom on a crime scene, pop up again wherever he’d like.  It makes it ridiculously easy to catch murderers, simple to check on his theories; all he has to do is lurk just out of sight behind the frame of the mirror and spy on his target.  Of course, he needs his brilliance and his genius far more than he needs the mirrors, but they are a useful tool.

            So it isn’t surprising the first time he accidentally leaves John Watson behind at a crime scene, because he is so unused to having someone else with him.  He’s sliding out of the mirror in 221B before he remembers he left John at Brixton.  He almost turns around and goes back, but his pride won’t let him, and John doesn’t even remonstrate with him when he sends an irritated text, _If inconvenient, come anyway_ , doesn’t even mention it.  Strange.  Most people find it remarkably frustrating when Sherlock simply disappears.  Maybe it’s this that makes him start to pay closer attention to the apparently normal army doctor, but really he knows that it isn’t; it’s just John.

            There’s just something about him.

            Sherlock finds himself watching John at strange times.  Sometimes he slides into the mirror in their bathroom just so he can hide out of John’s sight and observe him more.  He knows by now which side of his face John shaves first, how he always puts the cap back onto Sherlock’s toothpaste before he brushes his own teeth (of course it was obvious that John was putting the cap back on, but he could not have deduced the order of events without seeing them firsthand).  He has seen every inch and centimeter of John’s body, and it doesn’t occur to him that watching your flatmate shower might be seen as a bit not good.  If it had, it wouldn’t deter him, because what do proprieties matter when he can see the way John’s scar ripples and pulls with the movement of his muscles beneath his skin?

            But Sherlock is a watcher, an observer, he doesn’t know what to do with all this information.  This isn’t a case; there is no obvious goal.  All he knows is that John is becoming a part of him; he knows the other man better than he knows London (and that’s saying something), and what’s more surprising is that John knows him almost as well, even though John cannot observe and he certainly cannot walk the mirrors; mirrors, to John Watson, are simply panes of solid glass with metal backing.  But still.  John knows when he hasn’t eaten, when he hasn’t slept.  John knows when he’s angry, when he’s frustrated, and why.  John knows how to get him to eat (repeatedly telling Sherlock to do something is useless, but if John makes himself a little bit too much for dinner and doesn’t quite finish it, and then just gives him a _look_ , Sherlock finds himself finishing off the plate for him, and he doesn’t have any idea why, and it is the most _infuriating_ and yet wonderful puzzle in the world).  John can get him to sleep.  John can get him to be polite (only sometimes, but that’s more than anyone else in the world can do).

            And John always knows how to touch him.  A soft brush of fingers on the back of his neck will calm Sherlock’s furiously-racing brain just a little, a steady hand on just beneath his elbow will stop him from feeling as he’s _alone_ , as if he has no one in the world (which Sherlock would scorn to admit he feels, but he knows he does not feel it when John touches him like that).  A press of John’s steady hand on his shoulder tells him to _wait_ , a simple finger on his face means _I’m sorry_ ; a whole hand beneath his cheek is _I forgive you_.

            But he still can’t find the solution to the puzzle of how John Watson can do all these things until he sees him wrapped in semtex and still somehow trying to protect Sherlock from his own stupidity.

            _I will burn the HEART out of you._

_I’ve been reliably informed that I don’t have one._

_But we both know that’s not quite true._

He hadn’t, until that moment.  But it _is_ true, John Watson is his heart (the heart he shouldn’t have, the heart he doesn’t know he had, the heart that appeared out of whole-cloth from nowhere.)

            He almost says this, after the pool, both of them huddled together in the back of a taxi-cab (Sherlock doesn’t use the mirrors to move around so often anymore; he doesn’t want to go anywhere John cannot follow), almost lets the words bubble up and spill over his lips.  But sociopath that he is (that he says he is), he cannot find the right way to say them, and then he thinks, perhaps, words are not the correct thing to do, perhaps if he takes John’s face with his hands and presses their lips together, John will understand…

            But what if he doesn’t?  In the end, Sherlock does nothing, and John puts a hand on the back of his neck and rubs it, even after they get out of the taxi, all the way up to the flat, until they fall asleep on the couch together and wake up in a mess of tangled limbs and embarrassment.

            Having a heart is a strange feeling.  It makes Sherlock observe all sorts of things he has somehow failed to observe all these years, all about himself.  He observes how deeply he cares about Mrs. Hudson (and somewhere inside his head, a voice whispers that he never cared about his own mother like this), how he might call Lestrade friend if he weren’t Sherlock Holmes, how Molly is more to him than a mere key to open the morgue.  (Molly doesn’t see it herself, but then she’s never been very observant, and how could she see something that Sherlock himself had never seen?)  John has somehow seen all these things before Sherlock, and Sherlock cannot understand it, except to repeat to himself (somewhere in the back of his head, not even quite verbalized, _John Watson is my heart_ ).

            When Moriarty sets up his newest trap, Sherlock is scornful of it (and even when he realizes it’s more than he thought it was going to be, that he should have listened to what John had to say about the press, he still knows he has it under control).  Even the suicide is simple to work out; all he has to do is place a mirror beneath St. Bart’s, employ Molly’s and the Homeless Network’s help to do a bit of misdirection.  It hurts to watch John’s face, but he’ll ask his forgiveness tonight when he slides back in through the mirror in the front room of Baker Street.  This time, he’ll tell John everything.  He deserves to know; he needs to know, and Sherlock can no longer hide anything about himself from John.

            It isn’t until he steps into the room across from Lestrade’s office (just to make sure) that he realizes Moriarty was lying.  That he never intended to call off the snipers.  There was no password, and Sherlock’s own death would have been meaningless.  He has very little time.  He kills the man who is aiming for Greg (and doesn’t realize he’s referred to him as Greg in his mind), one swift blow to the head, crushing his skull with the only object he has available, which is the mirror he came through.

            He has to run through the house to find the next mirror, and it wastes precious time.  This mirror doesn’t connect easily to where he wants to go, and it’s hard—too hard--to follow his mental map; it keeps flickering and dimming and going _wrong_ , because his mind is so full of John’s blood and heart and body ( _why did I never tell him?  Sentiment is a chemical defect, found in the losing side_ ).  But he makes it to the second sniper, and this time he’s got the gun from the first one; he blows the man’s head off, and takes one small second to glance across and make sure that Mrs. Hudson is fine, and then he’s off and running through the maze again.

            He shouldn’t have taken that second, because a second is all that is needed for a finger to depress a trigger, and the bullet is already flying before he can stop it.  There is nothing left, the world tilting, reforming ( _no please John not John don’t die please_ ), and then he knows there is only one thing left, because if he forces the man into his reflection, his bullet will slide across from this world to the empty one behind the mirrors, and miss John because John won’t be there.

            He doesn’t hesitate, though he hears Mycroft’s old warning ringing in his head as he reaches out and pulls Sebastian Moran ( _forty-five years of age, freelance after being kicked out of the army, Moriarty’s lover_ ) backwards through the mirror.

            He feels the universe breaking around him.  There is pain, stabbing pain through his head and his arms, as if he has really broken through a window and is covered in shards of broken glass, and he sees the mirror in front of him shatter in a welter of broken glass, hears the sound like a roaring waterfall in his ears, and the world becomes cold and dark.

            _Seven years’ bad luck._

            John feels a cold breeze on the side of his head, but it doesn’t matter, because everything in him is cold, dead, and shattered, like the body of the man lying on the pavement.  He lets them pull him away, and he doesn’t even cry, because all his tears are dried up and frozen somewhere inside.

~

            John’s going mad.

            It doesn’t seem to matter much (because nothing seems to matter much now), but it hurts.  He wishes he could go crazy a different way that wasn’t so painful.

            He sees Sherlock everywhere.  Not properly, but out of the corner of his eye.  He’ll be standing in the men’s room at work (he’s had to go in to splash some water on his face, to wash away the tear tracks, because the tears do come now), and he’ll see a tall shadow to the side of the mirror, but when he turns around there’s no one there, and looking back, there’s nothing.

            He’ll be gazing through the window of a taxi, and see the clear grey eyes looking back, staring straight into him.  He’ll reach out his fingers, and Sherlock will be gone again, torn away from him for a reason he still can’t fathom (though it was Moriarty, of course, it was always Moriarty).  He can’t even grieve as he’d like to, because he can’t get past the denial step, and he goes around everywhere cold and numb.

            The worst day is a cold day in early December.  He’s had a long day, and he takes a long, hot shower, because he’s found that the hot water sometimes manages to clear his head, at least a little.  When he gets out, the mirror is completely fogged with steam, but he swears there is a tall shadow hovering behind it again.

            John’s going crazier than ever, because the shadow reaches out a finger and begins to write in the steam (he must be writing backwards, but that wouldn’t be hard for Sherlock).  _I miss you_.

            John reaches out a hand, and the shadow reaches out a hand, and they meet where John’s reflection must also be raising its hand, and then John is on the floor, and he’s sobbing, and when he looks up the words are still there in the dissipating steam.

            _I miss you._


End file.
